The public and private sectors face a steep challenge to improving science and technology education in the United States at the risk of falling behind in global competitiveness, a group of technology leaders said Monday at the InformationWeek 500 Conference.

For Jim Goodnight, CEO and founder of SAS, the key job is to bring the buzz back to the IT world. "We have to find a way to sink that hook into them at an early age to get them interested," he said. At SAS, that means funding digital education in primary and secondary schools. SAS has been funding curricula development for a few dozen schools in North Carolina, and Goodnight said he wants to see more government funding for tech education.

Goodnight said he is also concerned about the high school dropout rate in this country. "It's very embarrassing that the United States only graduates about two-thirds of its kids out of high school," he said. "We haven't got a chance of creating more skills and capabilities if a third of our kids are dropping out. You have to have extremely knowledgeable workers just to be in the service industry of the future."

What follows if schools don't produce technology professionals is that jobs and innovation will flow to where the jobs are: the tech outsourcing hotbeds of China and India.

One of the reasons the U.S. is falling behind in the rate of science and tech graduates may be that it's become a more complacent society, Goodnight said. "In India, a mother only has to point out the windows and say, 'do you want to live out here?'" he said. "Education is the only way out there." With standards of living pushing that drive in the developing world, Goodnight said he was concerned that it would only be a matter of time before innovation moves to countries such as India and China, unless the United States does something to spark its collective brainpower.

In the United States, then, there needs to be some sort of strategy put in place to make tech jobs look exciting, as well as an education strategy that helps kids keep up in tech education. However, Goodnight said education overhauls aren't enough. He said he would like to see H1B visa reform, and potentially, government spending of stimulus money to encourage tech education.